Slipshod Paradise

Running the shadows with the worst of 'em.

The Great Escape, pt 1

The bitch...

01/10/2072, Mid Afternoon

Still sitting in the van, the team begins to dissect the information Donavan recovered from City Hall for a job involving the demolition of an apartment complex in Virginia Beach. Unbeknownst to the runners, a team of mercenaries was already closing on their van.

Across the Elizabeth, JC slips out of VR as things wind down in Norfolk to answer his door. Outside, a pair of armed men are supporting a third, clearly wounded, man. With a glance towards Yuri and the Russian’s mastiff, JC lets his latest client into his home. Even as they cross the threshold, JC knows something is wrong, the two big goons let go of the injured man, whose wounds vanish before JC’s eyes even as the man launches into a spell.

Glancing in his side-view, Donavan has just enough time to register the men in combat gear approaching when they open up on the van, taking out the tires, then firing through the windows at Donavan. One of them breaks the side window and tosses in a gas canister. Fortunately, Donavan rapidly snatches up the canister and returns it to the assailants.

Meanwhile, JC is falling back before the hail of rubber-bullets sent his way, dropping to VR and summoning his drones and motorcycle to his assistance while Boris and Yuri engage the gunmen in melee combat. Outside, Kiku, JC’s erstwhile compatriot, happens to be driving past when she spots the exchange in JC’s home. She stops and engages the gunmen from behind.

Trapped in a cross-fire of dog teeth and elven bullets, the attack on JC’s is quickly dismantled. With an angered Sanura summoning up an air elemental and a panicked March raining bullets from his drone, the assault on the van is similarly destroyed. The two halves of the team each end with a prisoner, though two of the van’s assailants escape to their car, fleeing for North Carolina.

While the teams are rounding up their captives, JC introduces Kiku to Yuri before beginning a search for suspicious vehicles using his drones.

Between interrogation of their prisoners, JC’s scouting, and the assistance of “Black” Tony, the team discovers that their assailants were in the employ of an Irish gun runner named Seelie Flynn. She intended for the team to be tricked into believing they’d been kidnapped by Vincent’s organization. Vincent, it would seem, had established himself as something of a black market arms dealer following Marcello’s arrest. Further, Seelie appears to have been Marcello’s employer and blames Vincent for Marcello’s trouble with the law.

Seelie had started investigating the party after one of her operatives had made a discovery. Someone named Karl Roberts, one of JC’s false identities, had interferred with one of Vincent’s pet projects, the cyber-surgical alteration of the mercenary known as Shadow. Supporting Karl’s actions was a hacker named Marcus Belrin, wanted by Evo for crimes unknown.

To make matters worse for March, Yuri learns that this Marcus Belrin is worth quite a lot of money to both Zombie Technologies and Evo. Now, he simply needs to put a face to a name…

When the team is finally pulled together at JC’s, Donavan, JC and March step aside for a terse conversation where JC and March lay out what they’ve learned about Shadow. JC also does his best to make Donavan understand that he subverted the systems Vincent had installed through the drone “Gort” the best he could.